Greatest Software Ever Written 4262

Well, to be exact, they're still "able" but it's a lot more difficult.

You wish. Plenty of places around the world at various times where it was a criminal offense to teach or publicly use some minority (locally) language, or indeed anything but the local one...

There have been examples where the enforcement of such rules was effective from some point on so the younger half of a family's children only know the official language. Nasty.

And that's been shown to be a problem in more ways than one, too, if not quite as bad. But it is effective from the viewpoint of this thing called "national unity", no question about that.

Wonder how many people nowadays only get familiar with the concept of "dialect" through computer programming. I remember having to rework BASIC listings for simple games from a book that had working listings for the BASIC interpreters of several different "home computers" but not ours... as a kid who wanted to play the games.

I had been exposed somewhat to slightly divergent dialects of a couple of different natural languages before then, of course, but hadn't paid much attention IIRC.

-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.